Equal of the Sun: A Novel

Iran in 1576 is a place of peace, wealth, and dazzling beauty. But when the Shah dies without having named an heir, the court is thrown into tumult. Princess Pari, the Shah's daughter and closest adviser, knows more about the inner workings of the state than almost anyone, but the princess's maneuvers to instill order after her father's sudden death incite resentment and dissent. Pari and her trusted servant, a eunuch able to navigate the harem as well as the world beyond the palace walls, are in possession of an incredible tapestry....

Girl in Translation

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office.

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors.

A Man Called Ove

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon - the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell". But behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.

Amy Snow: A Novel

It is 1831 when eight-year-old Aurelia Vennaway finds a naked baby girl abandoned in the snow on the grounds of her aristocratic family's magnificent mansion. Her parents are horrified that she has brought a bastard foundling into the house, but Aurelia convinces them to keep the baby, whom she names Amy Snow. Amy is brought up as a second-class citizen, but she and Aurelia are as close as sisters. When Aurelia dies at the age of 23, she leaves Amy 10 pounds. But Aurelia also left her much more.

From Sand and Ash

As children, Eva Rosselli and Angelo Bianco were raised like family but divided by circumstance and religion. As the years go by, the two find themselves falling in love. But the church calls to Angelo and, despite his deep feelings for Eva, he chooses the priesthood. Now, more than a decade later, Angelo is a Catholic priest and Eva is a woman with nowhere to turn. With the Gestapo closing in, Angelo hides Eva within the walls of a convent.

Tallgrass

During World War II, a family's life is turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the "interlopers", the "strangers". Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned 13 and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair.

The Nightingale

Audie Award, Fiction, 2016. From the number-one New York Times bestselling author comes Kristin Hannah’s next novel. It is an epic love story and family drama set at the dawn of World War II. She is the author of twenty-one novels. Her previous novels include Home Front, Night Road, Firefly Lane, Fly Away, and Winter Garden.

The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel

All children mythologize their birth... So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's beloved collection of stories, long famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale. The enigmatic Winter has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she summons a biographer to tell the truth about her extraordinary life: Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth remains an ever-present pain.

The Lake House

Living on her family’s gorgeous lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, clever, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented fourteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure ...One midsummer’s eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest son, Theo, has vanished without a trace.

The Girl Who Wrote in Silk

Inara Erickson is exploring her deceased aunt's island estate when she finds an elaborately stitched piece of fabric hidden in the house. As she peels back layer upon layer of the secrets it holds, Inara's life becomes interwoven with that of Mei Lein, a young Chinese girl mysteriously driven from her home a century before. Through the stories Mei Lein tells in silk, Inara uncovers a tragic truth that will shake her family to its core - and force her to make an impossible choice.

A Little Life: A Novel

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.

The Alice Network: A Novel

In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive.

The Life We Bury

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline's world is forever changed when Hitler's army invades Poland in September 1939 - and then sets its sights on France. An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry: A Novel

Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is 77 years old and crazy, standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-men-who-want-to-talk-about-Jesus crazy. She is also Elsa's best and only friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother's stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.

Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager - obsessed with music, food, and girls - but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier - a move they think will keep him out of combat.

America's First Daughter: A Novel

In a compelling, richly researched novel that draws from thousands of letters and original sources, best-selling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie tell the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson's eldest daughter, Martha "Patsy" Jefferson Randolph - a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic founding father and shaped an American legacy.

The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year, and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mind - she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.

Secrets of a Charmed Life

Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for decades...beginning with who she really is. What Kendra receives from Isabel is both a gift and a burden--one that will test her convictions and her heart.

News of the World: A Novel

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

Before We Were Yours: A Novel

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge - until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children's Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents - but they quickly realize the dark truth.

Audible Editor Reviews

Why we think it's Essential: I knew Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo from her Oscar-nominated performance in The House of Sand and Fog, and hoped for another star turn in her narration of Anita Amirrezvanivs debut novel - I wasn't disappointed. Aghdashloo's deep, raspy voice is absolutely haunting, whether describing the (surprisingly) fascinating intricacies of rug-making or re-telling the Iranian folktales that are woven into the story. A colorful, lush tale that I didn't want to end. Diana Dapito

Publisher's Summary

In 17th-century Persia, a 14-year-old woman believes she will be married within the year. When her beloved father dies, she and her mother find themselves alone and without a dowry. With nowhere else to go, they are forced to sell the brilliant turquoise rug the young woman has woven to pay for their journey to Isfahan, where they will work as servants for her uncle, a rich rug designer in the court of the legendary Shah Abbas the Great.

Despite her lowly station, the young woman blossoms as a brilliant designer of carpets, a rarity in a craft dominated by men. But while her talent flourishes, her prospects for a happy marriage grow dim. Forced into a secret marriage to a wealthy man, the young woman finds herself faced with a daunting decision: forsake her own dignity, or risk everything she has in an effort to create a new life.

This books appears to be have written to be read out loud. While listening to it, you feel like someone is sitting across from you in your living room and telling you their story. More importantly, with the middle east in the news every day, it educates the readers about the rich culture of Iran. 400 years later, many things have remained the same in parts of Iran, and that region. If you liked the "twentieth wife," "the bed of roses," Amy Tan's first novels or Lisa See's novel, you will love this book. I highly recommend it.

I am reviewing this book some months after reading it and I find myself revisiting the characters in my mind time and time again. What a wonderful book! I put this book in the Top 5 of all books I have read (listened to) and loved in my lifetime (46 years - 40 of those as an avid reader and most recently as an avid audiobook listener). The narrator, Shohreh Aghdashloo (who you may remember was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the displaced Iranian Colonel's wife in House of Sand and Fog)had the perfect accent and made the prose and the dialog flow easily and come alive more than any words on the page could. I would listen to anything she read. I have recommended this to friends and family and they have all loved it as well. Highly recommended!

This book totally transported me into another world. It has become one of my favorite books and I have recommended it to a number of friends. I would advise you to listen to the sample first as the narrator's voice is very different. I found her voice to be very soothing and the accent to be beautifully musical and I would listen to another read by her but it may not be fore everyone. It was a fascinating listen.

This is one of those books that I worried about as I listened to it. The book was well-written, the subject a new one for me -- the protagonist is a young Persian woman faced with a dire life situation (this in 16-17th c Persia)who becomes a rug-maker. Lovely book, one learns about life and rugs (who knew how interesting that would be! It is!) but what I thought was interesting about this book is that again and again I thought -- ah please let the author not go down this path...or that path...and she didn't. I was very fearful that she would end the book badly -- and she didn't. Though she uses Persian fables as a framing device and I almost wished she hadn't used the last one, the book ends beautifully before the last story is told. But I was SO happy that the author almost always avoided the world of cliche that she seemed to be approaching. There were some exceptions (the fortune-teller who looks at the protagonist's palm after giving her best friend a fabulous life review and, when faced with the protagonist's palm, shrinks away in horror) but these were minor vs. the major events I feared. A minor quibble with the narrator-- the story is really a teenage girl's story, and the narrator is a much older woman -- she's an excellent reader but the voice itself is not well-matched to the novel.

Otherwise a lovely book, and always doubly delightful to read a book that sparks an interest in something I'd never cared much about (Persian rugs) before!

This is an audiobook I could not have finished if it weren't for the strong narration by Shohreh Aghdashloo who is a wonderful storyteller. The book is a sort of Perils of Pauline in 17th century Iran. The characters are not well developed or even coherent, but the setting is interesting and you learn a lot about Iranian culture. I have always wondered about the daily lives of people in different times in different countries and I found that historical fiction aspect of the book interesting. I found the lack of character depth frustrating because the book is so long and the story wanders everywhere but I have to admit I listened until the end. I think the narration made me want to finish, I don't think I could have finished this book if I were reading it on pages instead of hearing it.

I enjoyed the novel, particularly learning more about life in 17th century Persia and carpet making. Shohreh Aghdashloo's unique narration was a real bonus. I looked forward to my daily commute and the opportunity to hear this great actress read this tale.

I knew Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo from her Oscar-nominated performance in The House of Sand and Fog, and hoped for another star turn in her narration of Anita Amirrezvanivs debut novel - I wasn't disappointed. Aghdashloo's deep, raspy voice is absolutely haunting, whether describing the (surprisingly) fascinating intricacies of rug-making or re-telling the Iranian folktales that are woven into the story. A colorful, lush tale that I didn't want to end.

What a wonderful, dynamic, lavishly written epic story. So much beauty in the words, painting pictures of a time gone by, in a place whose culture is so mysterious to much of the world. A powerful protagonist who makes lemonade from lemons and rises up with inspiration, in the face of oppression. Lush evocative depictions of exotic lands, beautiful stories, wonderful characters that you care for, great story arcs :) the narrator was gorgeous, never wanted her to stop speaking with her rich sultry accent!

When listening to audiobooks, I (being the picky person that I am) usually find that something is lacking either in narration, editing, or the story itself. However, this book is worthy of 5 stars. The story unfolds slowly and eloquently, with such beautiful detail that it feels like a rich dessert for the senses. Ever read a book that seemed to end before the actual story was over, as if the author lost the drive to continue and decided to leave the conclusion up to the readers' imagination? There were a couple points in the story where I expected that to happen- the author would simply end it and I'd be left wanting more. Luckily, this writer lovingly weaves the entire story together herself all the way through, leaving little left untold.